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What Apple did for Macs when switching architectures, though, was to port their own software to the new architecture. Microsoft doesn't even port fucking Minesweeper to ARM.
Another thing they did is add hardware support for the x86 strong memory model to their ARM chips, allowing for efficient emulation. Without this, translated code takes a big performance hit.
Did Qualcomm add something similar to their ARM CPUs ?
They've still got things that haven't changed since about Windows 3.1, like that ODBC dialog window.
Why the fuck would they name it PRISM?
Just being honest about how much data Windows collects these days...
Maybe their goal is to bury that prism and hope people forget?
I don't see this working. The reason that Apple and ARM work is because Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
In what sense? The vast majority of macOS software is downloaded/installed from the internet, just like Windows.
I don’t see it working because the Windows APIs are a dozen self-oxidizing dumpster fires scattered into the wind, but that’s a different story.
They control the ecosystem in the way that they provide what hardware is new on MacOS and what capabilities it has. So if any developer wants to support modern devices they have to port to that new hardware. They don't have any choice, if they want to stay relevant.
I don’t really know if ARM adds benefits I’d really notice as an end user, but it’ll be interesting to see if this really goes through and upends the dominant architecture we’ve seen for really 40+ years.
As an ARM Mac user, I wouldn’t trade all this new battery life for an x86 processor
Second this. Not to mention INSTANT resume from hibernation! It's fucking crazy. I can use this thing ALL DAY doing webGL CAD work and Orca Slicer and barely scratch 50%.
With a modern system, I honestly don't think there's a noticeable difference between suspend to ram and suspend to disk. They've gotten the boot times down so much that it's lightning-fast. My work laptop's default is suspend to disk, and I don't notice a difference except when it prompts for the bitlocker password.
S0 standby is borderline unusable on many PCs. On Apple silicon macs it's damn near flawless.
My current laptop is probably the last machine to support S3 standby and I do not look forward to replacing it and being forced back into a laptop that overheats and crashes in my backpack in less than 15 minutes. On my basic T14 it works ok for the most part, but my full fat Thinkpad P1 with an i9 is in S0 standby for longer than a few minutes, and sometimes uses more power than when it was fully on. Maybe Meteor lake with it's LP E cores will fix this but I doubt it.
There's nothing stopping x86-64 processors from being power efficient. This article is pretty technical but does a really good explanation of why that's the case: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/
It's just that traditionally Intel and AMD earn most of their money from the server and enterprise sectors where high performance is more important than super low power usage. And even with that, AMD's Z1 Extreme also gets within striking distance of the M3 at a similar power draw. It also helps that Apple is generally one node ahead.
If there's 'nothing stopping' it then why has nobody done it? Apple moved from x86 to ARM. Mobile is all ARM. All the big cloud providers are doing their own ARM chips. Intel killed off much of the architectural competition with Itanic in the early 2000's. Why stop?
I'm not expert, but I can tell you that Apple Silicon gave the new Macbooks insane battery life, and they run a lot cooler with less overheating. Intel really fucked up the processors in the 2015-2019 Macbooks, especially the higher-spec i7 and i9 variants. Those things overheat constantly. All Intel did was take existing architectures and raise the clock speeds. Apple really exposed Intel's laziness by releasing processors that were just as performant in quick tasks, they REALLY kicked Intel's ass in sustained workloads, not because they were faster on paper, but simply because they didn't have to thermal throttle after 2 minutes of work. Hell, the Macbook Air doesn't even have any active cooling!
I'm not saying these Snapdragon chips will do exactly the same thing for Windows PC's, obviously we can't say that for sure yet. But if they do, it will be fucking awesome for end users.
If nothing else it breaks the stranglehold the 2.1 x86 licensees (Intel and AMD) have on the Windows market. Its just that that market is much MUCH smaller than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
The idea is ARM can be more efficient, which translates as longer battery life and/or faster computers for the end user.
One of the biggest problems I had with windows on ARM was drivers. Most of my devices that needed drivers didn’t have an arm compatible version available. This needs to change more urgently than simply being able to run software, for me, at least.
…It took them only 4 years to follow the leader this time.
It has more to do with manufacturers than Microsoft. Nobody was making high performance ARM chips, so there was never a market for windows on ARM until now
Windows on arm was a thing, I had a surface 2 rt about a decade ago, too bad it never felt like microsoft ever really fully committed to the idea imo, and yeah x86 apps wouldn't run on it (though there was an emulation tool apparently, was community developed). Market was definitely there (though I'm not sure how big it was, probably a cross over with netbook users), they just fumbled it like they did windows phone in my view.
